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Archive for February, 2013

Google+ is an intelligent social media platform in which good SEO practice can be enhanced and refined. It has a wide variety of features tailor made for posting and sharing quality content, with easy to use interfaces which can enhance your SEO. For starters, the concept of Google+ ‘Circles’ allow users to organise each aspect of their online life, from family and friends, co-workers and also interests. These circles can be created by you, and Google+ allows you to filter them, personalising what streams appear on your homepage when you visit Google+. Obviously this is a great way of refining search results even more. If your website is linked with Google+ there is also the option of using direct connect, which allows people to add your site to their circles directly from search results.

Google+ also has an interesting application called Explore, a simple way of bringing trending topics directly to you from outside the site. You’re able to filter these trending topics by category, making it easier to find exactly what you need. By using the best SEO practices it’s easier for people to find you from within Google+.

Another great feature of Google+ is the +1 button that can be put on each page of your content. With this feature, other people can ‘+1’ it. Google is able to track these clicks and use each +1 as a ranking signal. These ranking signals are integrated into their real-time search results, making it even simpler to enable your content to appear higher in the rankings. As these ‘+1’s are clicked by real people, it’s also a good indicator of the quality of your content. When people endorse you through the +1 button it helps Google to trust that your content is of a good standard. The importance and effectiveness of the +1 button cannot be stressed enough, as it is an incredibly powerful tool which has the ability of really boosting your page rankings.

Finally, Google+ has a robust blogging interface where you can keep people updated with your content, embedding as many links to your site as needed within each post. Facebook and Twitter are no doubt important and useful for this, but nowhere near as effective as Google+ when it comes to search results, as Facebook and Twitter restrict Google from accessing a lot of their data. When writing these blogs, the first sentence becomes part of the title tag, so good SEO practice by using the right keywords helps rankings even more. These blogs can be shared in your circles and spread around Google+. Sharing is important and enables your content to be seen by a wider audience.

Your Google+ account is linked with your Gmail account, so chances are you may have one already. It’s a wonderfully simple tool to help you with SEO, so go check it out and discover for yourself, you won’t regret it!

Like so many web-based trends, the word ‘blog’ has passed from novelty to ubiquity. Even though their use by people to keep friends updated on their lives has mostly been superseded by people instead keeping one or several profiles on one of the big social media sites, blogs still make up a huge part of activity on the web. Whether you come across them following a Google search for virtually any subject under the sun or they are used by journalists or activists to break big news scoops, blogs are now just as much a feature of online life as email and regular websites.

Strangely, though, many businesses haven’t caught onto this fact. Although nowadays you’ll struggle to find a business that doesn’t have some sort of web presence—even most small businesses have a website of some description, or at least a listing in an online business directory of some sort—many of them don’t keep a blog.

Well, why should they, you might ask. Aren’t blogs just for disseminating news or for providing a stream of new information? And isn’t it just enough for my business to keep its website updated?

The answer to all these questions, as any copywriting professional or SEO copywriting expert will tell you, is a resounding no. Smart businesses know that keeping a blog is one of the best strategies out there for reaching your target market.

There are a couple of reasons for this, which all go beyond what a blog is superficially understood to be by many. Firstly, although blog posts are linked to the date when they are published, they shouldn’t be thought of as some sort of online equivalent of a newspaper article that’s read one day and forgotten the next.

Rather, they’re a source of information that people regularly refer back to. And more often than not, your customers will be interested in the world that surrounds the products or services you offer, rather than simply purchasing from you and that being the end of the matter.

Businesses that operate blogs that inform and enlighten with regard to their field of activity therefore get many, many more visitors than standalone websites. So long as they deploy skillful copywriting that brings to life the products and services they offer (to give an example, a site selling fashion accessories running a blog on upcoming trends in handbags or reports from fashion shows),both potential customers who come across the blog in the course of a Google search and regular readers of the blog alike will continually be passing by your site.

The all-important Google search itself is another reason to consider hiring the services of a professional SEO copywriting outfit to run a blog. One of the fundamental rules of online commerce is the higher in the search engine rankings you are, the more customers you’ll get. A blog is one of the most important ways to climb up those rankings.

This is largely due to the technicalities of how search engine results are calculated, the complexities of which our SEO copywriting experts would be more than happy to talk you through. But in a nutshell, the more the keywords that people use to search for the product you offer appear on your site, the higher it’ll appear in the search engines. (Identifying these keywords is another thing our SEO copywriting experts can help you with.)

Now, if your site has little in the way of text it’ll struggle to get a high position. But if it has an extensive blog in which these terms are regularly used within its articles, it’ll sail up to the first page of results in no time.

In our next blog post we’ll cover some of the most popular copywriting ideas for great blog-post content. But if in the meantime you’d like to learn more about how our copywriting services and SEO expertise can help you, then we’d be delighted if you got in touch with us.

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As we covered in an earlier article, the importance of SEO of the title of your web pages shouldn’t be underestimated – and nor should it be overlooked for the content of your web pages either. However, it’s also really important to maintain the quality of your copywriting as well as optimising the content for [...]